Inheritance (5 page)

There was a music room with a veena with a carved dragon’s head in red and yellow at the end of its long neck, and a violin that Aunt Shalani could play on her visits. I don’t know who played drums, but a mridangam stood in a corner. My grandmother said there used to be many musical evenings in the house when my mother was young. My mother’s room and a small room with a writing desk and dusty trunks and wardrobes completed the house.

My grandmother told some stories about my mother to me. How when she was young, she could run like a pony, fast on her feet. How she liked to wear ribbons
in her hair and wanted green ones for every birthday. My mother was born March 11, and the astrologists said hers was to be a special life.

Until I was fifteen, I had never thought of my family as sad. We were not wealthy, but my grandfather had been a structural engineer of some renown. My mother, of course, had stripped our family bare, and because of her ours was a family violated by scandal, indiscretion, and shame. It was like Phaedra wedded to the House of Athens; of course, even after her, the House endured. But while Phaedra had been cursed by the gods, my mother alone was responsible for her actions. So I thought. Our family shook like a tree after my mother’s various transgressions. Once Jani and I attended a bharatnatyam recital in the city; as we were being seated, several acquaintances murmured a hello. It was then that someone whispered something about “those poor girls” and I realized our situation must look bad on the outside. I wanted to shoot the whisperer immediately.

My great-uncle, with his strange mannerisms and shaky past—a man whose nails were yellow with opium, whose head swam with drugs—did little to help us; he would get dreamy in the middle of the day. He liked to wear multicolored turbans. He thought Coleridge was the greatest poet ever and could recite “Kubla Khan” any time. My great-uncle was a thin, wraith-like man with a sweep of white hair that he sometimes pulled to a knot at his neck. I was twelve before I learned that he had been
married, that his wife had been struck by a car and died. I couldn’t imagine him married, any more than I could believe he had ever been a baby. I thought he had simply sprung from somewhere, fully grown and alone, born in a field of poppies with a pipe in his hand.

He was always lounging, a pillow behind his back, his legs completely relaxed. Even standing, he looked graceful, like a tall girl. His clothes all flowed. They rippled somehow, his shirttails long, his dhoti full of folds. Sometimes it seemed he didn’t have any bones in his body. They said opium eaters imagine they can make their bodies so malleable that they can slip through the smallest spaces; my great-uncle seemed to be able to go anywhere, his body merely pretending to be flesh.

My great-uncle was a painter. He could paint miniatures of courtly scenes of times past very efficiently. He would bend over small squares of canvas and apply blue, green, and red paints with the tiniest brush. He was extremely disciplined in the morning. He got up at dawn, performed his ablutions, ate a spartan meal. Then for four hours, he would attend to his canvas, silently working. He sold about half through an arts association in town, his customers being largely both island-Asian and Chinese. He had a retrospective once in Taiwan. He attended the opening-day ceremony, but growing bored, he hurried home to Pi, to his paint and his opium.

“Careful,” he’d say to me in Italian as I leafed through his works. “The gold will shake off the canvas if
you are not careful.” He painted dancing girls and musicians and once an unusual series of ordinary folk done in the courtly style, sweepers and villagers performing their daily tasks. He asked me to pose once, which caused a big ruckus with Grandmother.

I had one of his contemporary studies, as they were called, at home in Madras. It was of a schoolteacher with her pupils under a banyan tree. It gave me a sense of serenity. Through it, I saw his power, and I thought my family’s strength was inextinguishable.

The gossips didn’t think so. We were a family of women, without a strong man to give us buoyancy in the social waters of Madhupur. I didn’t think we needed men. My aunts largely managed without them, and prospered. In fact, I think, without men we were stronger. No one to slap us into obeisance. Society required women to marry, and men were needed to father children. But once that occurred, wouldn’t everyone be better if they vanished into their own worlds like my great-uncle, leaving women to conduct their lives? But my grandmother was worried about our reputations; she wanted to find a suitable boy for my cousin Jani to marry.

I looked forward to Jani’s arrival. She would make me laugh and help me keep my anger toward my mother at bay. But Grandmother said Jani was reported to be forever frowning, clutching Christian books in her
hands. Her eyes were listless and she would answer queries with monosyllables. “She’s moody because she longs for a companion,” my grandmother said, but I wasn’t sure. What had happened to Jani?

I spent March at my grandmother’s with a great deal of freedom. I’d rise late, read storybooks, eat lightly. I spied on my mother, as I’ve said, and made up stories to amuse myself. Often I took a chair to the field behind the house. I sat and watched the green grass, the dandelion fuzz at the edge of the field, the rough, high grass. Dragonflies speckled gold and green whizzed by, and fat bees sucked greedily from the nectar-laden flowers. Sometimes I could picture my entire life in the slow rise and fall of the field, the way it expanded so that I could see what was just in front of me really well but couldn’t make out what was in the distance.

Mango trees and palms dipped with the wind, and sometimes you could hear the thud of fruit falling. The monkeys would claim it, take a bite, and throw it away. They were wealthy here and had more than enough to spare.

Jani arrived on a Saturday. At once I sensed something wrong. Usually she would fling her bags down and cover us with kisses. But this Jani was different, distant, her
motions contained, her arms passive. She smiled and said everything was fine, only she was tired, could she go to bed? Grandmother and I were astonished.

Grandmother decided to go ahead and inquire for possible marriage partners for Jani. Through friends and relations, she located one, C.P. Iyengar. From his photograph, he seemed to be a likable young man, with a smooth face and smiling eyes. He played tennis, swam regularly, and had his degree in biotechnology. He also wrote poetry. I was impressed, and thought Grandmother might be right. He was visiting the island by chance (cosmic circumstance, my grandmother said), and I was eager to meet him, this tennis player from India.

Jani refused to talk about him, though. She simply shrugged her shoulders when I asked her how she felt about meeting him. I thought she was still tired.

Instead, I rattled off the many good things to look for in possible husbands, such as an interest in sports and dogs and tropical fish, a preference for Coca-Cola, and a good dress sense. I told her I would draw up a list she could use for reference, but she was uninterested.

With much reluctance, my cousin agreed to meet the family of the suitor Grandmother had selected. On the afternoon of the first visit, Jani dawdled in her room. She had put on her favorite blue sari, made of soft georgette with a simple dark blue border, but Grandmother thought it too plain. “You look like a schoolmistress,”
she said, advising a Benares silk. “But it is so hot,” complained Jani, and the two of them argued for a long time. Finally a pink and white cotton was chosen, very fashionable but comfortable. My mother slipped out early.

If Jani had been going to a picture, she’d have outlined her eyes in dark pencil, piled silver bangles on her arms, and dabbled on perfume secreted from my mother’s bureau. But for this afternoon, she just scrubbed her face and lingered in the room. When the visitors were announced, Vasanti merely crying loudly, “They’ve come!” my grandmother and I went to meet them. We ushered them in and settled ourselves in the drawing room. I sat on the sofa, opposite the sister-in-law. Only she and his brother came, preparing the way for a later visit from the parents and the boy himself. His brother looked a lot like him, and his wife had a big pink mouth and a blaring orange sari. She was from Bombay and spent a long time talking about her former home. They spoke almost in chorus, completing each other’s sentences, and praised C.P. He was an engineer, very capable of securing a promotion and possibly would be offered a position in Canada. Grandmother frowned a bit over that, and sensing her hesitation over having Jani so far away, the wife assured us that it would be several years before that could come to pass. Vasanti brought us tea and cakes.

It was a pretty tray, with almond and silver frosted cakes, thick pieces of shortbread, Mysoor halvah, spicy nuts, murruku, and water biscuits. The tea was strong
and hot, and Grandmother poured with grace. She gave me several pointed looks, for Jani still hadn’t come down, but I ignored her. If my cousin needed extra time before meeting prospective in-laws, I was not going to hurry her. Instead, I reached for a second slice of cake and examined our guests. They were polite, spoke English with British accents, suggesting educations or vacations abroad, and were conversant on contemporary films and dance recitals. They questioned me on my studies, asked me what subjects I particularly liked, and were not surprised when I said science. We then spoke of favorite books, and I slouched a little, enjoying our talk. I liked these people, especially the wife, and thought that perhaps with a drink or two, the brother might not be so bad either. It was while I was thinking this that Jani finally came down. She was wearing the blue sari and her glasses, which she doesn’t really need except for reading. She entered the room shyly, and at the last minute, tossed her head with indifference. Her face was settled into a mask, her eyes lowered, and her smile tight, as if acknowledging she was on display and that it wasn’t going to affect her.

Conversation was awkward, with Jani answering their queries in monosyllables, and myself and Grandmother making up for the difference. When at last the sweets tray was taken away, and the silver dish of paan and slender cigarettes offered, the visitors seemed to suggest that they could not stay much longer. The wife
invited Jani to tea at their house, “A simple affair, of course, but we might hear V. Lakshmi sing. Her singing is such a pleasure, don’t you think?” I agreed heartily, although I hadn’t any idea who V. Lakshmi was, and Grandmother glared at me while Jani for the first time seemed to smile. Grandmother accepted the invitation at once. I worried that their interest in Jani would fade if she didn’t respond more enthusiastically to their queries. But even still and quiet, my cousin projected a powerful if somewhat guarded picture, and I think they were impressed. Stubbornness is a quality that runs deep in our family, the very quality that Grandmother warned us would leave us husbandless and sorry.

They finally left. We promised to come for their musical afternoon, and courtesies and compliments were paid. Grandmother was very excited.

“I think they like you very much, my dear,” she said, giving Jani a little hug, “and you know, the blue is very becoming on you. Imagine them inviting us over so quickly; usually, they’d wait for a second interview. And the boy is very handsome, I hear, much better-looking in real life than in photographs. And did you hear her speaking so sweetly of her mother-in-law—yes, they are of very good family.”

And Grandmother would have replayed the entire afternoon word for word, if Jani had not complained of a headache and gone to her room. So Grandmother talked to me as I retrieved the sweets tray and attacked the remaining cakes with relish.

“Not every family would be so open-minded about us. No male in the family, no parents. But our name is very good. Your grandfather was one of the most respected men in this town, renowned for his designs. They still speak of the Forest Building with respect.”

My grandfather had designed the Forest Building for a Swiss corporation that was later taken over by Pepsi-Cola until it was banned from the island. It featured trees as pillars in the front and was now a government housing agency.

Grandfather had been an inventor as well, constantly busy with his hands. He developed a self-cleaning stove once but could find no backers. He said that women were destined to be chained to their housework if inventions were not created for them, but we all had servants to do the work and no one paid attention to him. Design those funny buildings, he was told, don’t try to change the world.

On the day of the singing soiree, Grandmother made sure we dressed up and had fresh flowers for our hair. I adjusted Jani’s jasmine and had her try on three saris until she chose the cream with flecks of gold and a border of large abstract mangoes and peacocks. It was an enchanting sari. Her bodice was long in the sleeve and cut attractively about the neck and back. She looked like a princess with her large bindhi—the mark on her forehead—and her regal stance. I was certain C.P. would flip
over her. My mother, of course, wasn’t coming. I don’t think my grandmother even asked her.

We took an old rickety bicycle rickshaw because my grandmother didn’t trust the motorized ones. Slowly, we pedaled our way to the other side of town, where the brother lived with his wife. C.P. was visiting them from Bangalore, where his parents had a large home. His father was in the timber business, managing ways for construction companies to locate and extract timber to house temporaries, people who visited the country on government business and departed quickly. He then went to do the same in other countries, and he made his way around Indonesia. The use of timber to build houses in India was very uncommon, since most architects preferred stone and concrete blocks. But timber was cheap, especially if it came from Thailand, and his was a thriving business.

The brother’s house was built of concrete, a modern flat in a compound called Ashoka Gardens. It was painted pale pink, and the avenue it faced was lined with tall palms. We took our sandals off in the patio where we were greeted with a lush scent of incense that hinted of both tranquillity and money. About ten people had been invited, not counting us, and the parlor was filled with rustling silks. The flat was nicely decorated, in cool cream shades (thank goodness Jani’s sari had a border or she would have melted into the background!) with large paper lamps and tasteful Mogul miniatures. A long
couch wound its way round in a vague semi-circular fashion, and the coffee table was teak, ornate, British Raj influenced. The apartment had an aura of spaciousness and quiet, typified by a large statue of Buddha in one corner.